A prototype leads to acquisition offer

Case study: accounting mobile app (December 2015)

Client: A financial services company was looking to build their very first software product. It was to be a SaaS mobile app with a goal to help accountants and their clients communicate. Every month millions of business owners spend long hours on phone or e-mail with their accountants. The idea was to shorten that time by creating a mobile app to help automate this process.

Context: Startup founders are visionaries, enthusiastic to bring their ideas to life. Thanks to that energy they can be great clients. But their optimism does not always go hand in hand with software development experience. Often they don’t provide a detailed product brief. For a product designer, it means I have to explain the product development basics and help figure what should the MVP. In the end, founders have the final say, but product designers translate their ideas into development language.

Objective: Help my client, a non-technical founder with deep knowledge of accounting industry figure out the MVP scope. After previously interviewing several software house companies my client quickly realized that they were willing to take on any project — bigger the better — because that translated into profit. The notion among them was to add features (and costs) rather than propose a way to validate the idea. My role was to create MVP prototype as a solution to gain feedback.

Process: I divided the process into 3 phases — each with its own goal — ultimately bringing me closer to product’s MVP and its validation.

1. Research

Goal: Understand product’s business and technical requirements. Corporate accounting is a strictly regulated industry with a yearly calendar, industry-standard software and a set of legal regulations. I needed to learn more about it to understand product’s business context.

Tools used: face-to-face expert interviews
I conducted 3 interviews:
- with an external accountant working with multiple businesses,
- with a corporate accountant working in the production industry,
- with a project manager from an industry leading software provider.

After this research, I learned about accounting-specific problems: data privacy, out-dated, mandatory government tax software and how a typical accountant user journey fit into it.

2. User scenarios

Goal: Create user scenarios for MVP and the final product
As a startup founder, my client had a vision of the product in mind. But the envisioned product was costly to execute and not designed with the user in mind. My goal was to change that by translating it into user scenarios — one for the final product, one for MVP.

Tools: user scenarios as flowcharts created in Gliffy software

3. MVP Prototype
Goal: Validate before building
Thanks to research phase I learned that accounting software products are complex and expensive to build. That is why I convinced my client to build the MVP of the product first. It allowed the startup team to communicated their idea better to potential investors and test clients.

Tools: Sketch software to create iOS UI design of the MVP
Flinto Mac app to turn that design into a clickable mobile prototype

What I learned working on this project

1. Become a process advocate

When working with stakeholders that lack software development experience, a designer must help explain the complexity of the development process.

In my knowledge what helps is using a pre-defined process that guides our client. On the one hand, it helps sets expectations, and on the other, it creates a roadmap on designer’s side.

2. Understand the business / legal landscape

Designing for highly regulated industries requires learning about their rules and legal limitations. Those have the direct impact on the design. I found it very helpful to seek expert advice to overcome that challenge.

3. Prototype first

It is much easier than a few years ago to create hi-fidelity prototypes. It has become a common practice to use them as a universal tool to gather feedback from users. That helps make the product better over time. However, in the case of this particular project, the prototype had an even more profound effect on it. After showing it to several potential investors, my client received first acquisition offer. I am convinced that MVP-first approach helped to explain the product better and faster.